Chapter 26 #2
The next day I wrote in my journal that my upset mood prompting me to reach out to her “must have been my intuition… I am still frightened and depressed now. I fear that she may sink again because she is all alone in the house… my hands tremble, my heart races, and my stomach is closed like an iron vault.”
All the while I was trying to keep up with schoolwork, I worried about Mom. I’d call to monitor how she was doing. As the Christmas holidays retreated further in the background, she seemed better. Then her poisonous paranoid mood would return. The middle of January 1978, I wrote:
“She has been snowed in for days and that is dangerous…”
It did no good to suggest she talk to Dr. Bill Griffin. Mom never admitted that she had ongoing psychiatric challenges. She would say she was “blue” or worried about money or the neighbors were hateful. She blamed her dark moods on past traumas, not seeing them as triggers to an underlying illness.
As she struggled with depression, so did I. The eating disorder was no better. I blamed it on myself.
“It is my willfulness which starves my flesh; yet I honestly cannot stop.”
At the time I was writing a term paper about Black Mountain College, once located in the Swannanoa Valley near Asheville.
It was an experimental institution for influential creatives like architect Buckminster Fuller, musician John Cage, architect Walter Gropius who started the Bauhaus School, in addition to others identifying themselves as the Beat Generation.
I’d heard stories about the place while growing up and was curious what I might be able to find out about it.
While home during Christmas break, I’d spent time in the Black Mountain public library looking at everything written about the college and any records in archives.
My method was journalistic even if I didn’t know it.
Black Mountain College had closed around the time I was born, but many of the artists were still alive. I wrote letters to any whose address I somehow managed to find. I didn’t expect anyone to answer, but that didn’t stop me.
“People are people, famous or not,” I journaled at the time. “And if I can locate them, I’ll ask anything I want.”
In early February I received a three-page letter from poet Allen Ginsberg, a central figure in the Beat Generation.
Friends with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg is best known for his poem “Howl.” He had little good to say to me about Martin Duberman’s book Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (1972).
“My opinion. Frankly, all this is sheer bullshit,” Ginsberg says in his January 28, 1978, handwritten letter on the back of two manuscript pages. “You’re asking my opinion from a distance on Duberman’s distant opinion of an event—Oh fuck it. It’s too stupid to blather more…”
I was astonished that Ginsberg had answered me, as was the Davidson faculty.
I also got responses from author Martin Duberman, playwright Eric Bentley, poet Joel Oppenheimer.
Another poet, Robert Creeley, also responded.
He agreed to let me interview him over the phone, and I invited him to campus. He came and did a reading.
He was kind enough to critique some of my poetry and had little good to say about it.
Unimpressed by my attempts to mimic Tennyson, Robert Creeley suggested I avoid iambic pentameter.
He called it archaic and monotonous. I should try reading modern poetry.
His visit to campus was a big event, and there was a buzz about my Black Mountain College project.
I was writing the paper for Charlie Cornwell, and in early March I appeared at his office to discuss it with him.
He was unfriendly, saying he was busy, and I left.
By the time I’d reached the main floor, I’d decided it wasn’t fair “for him to brush me off.” I stormed back up the stairs, finding his office door open.
“So I froze,” I noted in my journal. “I stood in the stairwell trying to get my head together. And he walked by & saw me!”
“I KNEW you were up here,” he said.
“How?” I asked.
“Because I could tell by your unique perfume.”
That embarrassed me. I wore Intimate by Revlon and must have overdone it, I thought.
“Doctor Cornwell, I really need to talk to you,” I said to him.
He invited me into his office, and I told him what “I thought of his brush-offs.” We began getting along a bit better after that. My paper “Sailing on to Eden” was twenty-four pages long, and Charlie gave me an A on it.
“The essay is masterfully organized and quite well written—until the final pages,” he commented in the margin.
A reminder that it’s important to have a good ending.
“Jargon!”
I learned the dangers of using a thesaurus.
“Ugh!”
Maybe the worst insult.
“The best word?”
“Use dashes ever so sparingly—”
“Poorly constructed sentence.”
He had something to say on every page.
In May 1978, Ruth Graham visited me on campus. She spent a night at the guesthouse and spoke at a luncheon open to all students. As much as she hated getting up in front of people, she did it anyway for me.
It was one of my proudest moments squiring her around.
She sat in on several of my classes, to the delight of my professors.
I introduced her to Charlie, and later in life the two of them would get along famously.
Not long after Ruth had visited the campus, I walked to his apartment unannounced, knocking on his door as the sun went down, telling him I had something to say.
He invited me in, and we sat in his living room.
I confessed I was in love with him. His only reaction was to smile and stand up, walking me to the door, wishing me a good night.
I felt like a fool as I returned to Henderson House.
I retreated to my bedroom, sitting down at my typewriter to resume work on my novel that wasn’t really one.
By now, I’d changed the title to Forum, using a lot of Roman archaeological allusions as I tried to create a work of literature. Tried too hard, in other words, much of the writing overblown and sentimental. Its only merit is the memories I captured at a time when they were sharp and fresh.
With rare exception, Charlie avoided me.
I’d see him walking across campus, and the next instant he would vanish as if abducted by aliens.
I started dating John Zambos, a good-looking Greek with brown eyes and thick dark hair.
He wanted to be a surgeon and my Peregrine House friends thought he was the perfect catch. But I had eyes only for Charlie.
There wasn’t the slightest glimmer of hope until I was headed to Oxford University for a summer program after my junior year.
The night before I left in early June, I happened to attend a keg party where Charlie was drinking beer with a crowd of students.
We started talking, and to my amazement he offered me a ride back to Henderson House.
I climbed into his TR6 and was disbelieving when he took me on a drive around the back streets of Davidson.
Stopping at the cemetery, we sat there for a long while in the dark, the headlights shining on old, tilted headstones.
I felt sure he liked me. I’d found my true love. It was really happening.
He told me he’d grown up on a farm outside Charlotte in the rural town of Latimore.
He’d gone to Davidson, then the University of Virginia in Charlottesville where he got his master’s degree and Ph.D.
I shared more about myself, admitting the intensity of my feelings. He said he loved me “as a friend.”